Latest trends in agricultural metabolomics and prospects for functional component analysis of agricultural products

Abstract

Metabolomics is a research method that comprehensively investigates the metabolites of living organisms and attempts to understand life phenomena by analyzing them. Generally, metabolites present in a sample are separated by a separation device such as liquid chromatography or gas chromatography, and then these are simultaneously and exhaustively measured with a mass spectrometer to determine the complete set of metabolites. After obtaining the information, we consider the signi?cance of them by conducting various analysis. In recent years, research on agricultural products and foods has been actively conducted by applying analytical techniques cultivated along with the development of metabolomics, and this paper describes the metabolome analysis focusing on the functional ingredients contained in agricultural products. First, metabolites contained in agricultural products with a known provenance possessed by NARO were extracted with 75％ ethanol. Then extracted metabolites were separated by a pentafluorophenylpropyl(PFPP) column, and retention time and mass information of each component were obtained by Q-TOF/MS. Subsequently, we identified the components that showed differences between the samples by differential analysis and considered the signi?cance of the differences in light of the provenance information. We will introduce some of the analysis results, and explain the future work.